Despite the ideal of a paperless environment that the popularization of computers had promised, paper continues to dominate the office landscape. Ironically, the computer itself has been a major contributing source of paper proliferation. The computer simplifies the task of document composition, and thus has enabled even greater numbers of publishers. Oftentimes, many copies of a document must be made so that the document can be shared among colleagues, thus generating even more paper.
To that end, multi-function peripherals (MFPs) have been developed to perform multiple functions on paper documents, including copying, printing, scanning, and transmitting documents. Each MFP usually has a display through which a user may control the MFP and see status of the operation(s) being performed by the MFP. This control includes the selection of finishing options with respect to print operations that the MFP is to perform. These finishing options include such functions as specifying the orientation of the document image to be printed, the number of documents to be printed per sheet, the staple angle and location, the punch style, as well as others.
Cover sheets and separator pages have been used extensively for routing, distributing, packing, and mailing materials in the past. U.S. Pat. No. 5,659,164 discusses the use of document separators for scanning in multiple documents at once. Also U.S. Pat. No. 5,115,326 describes the use of a coversheet in a fax to route a fax to an email address.
Collections of documents may be created on an MFP Collection Manager system as described in U.S. application Ser. No. 10/404,927, filed Mar. 31, 2003, entitled “Multimedia Document Sharing Method and Apparatus,” published Sep. 30, 2004 (publication no. 20040193571) are represented by a single collection coversheet. On the coversheet, every scanned page is shown separately. That is, all 100 pages of a 100 page document are displayed and each scanned page is stored separately. Although the entire document could be printed by printing the collection, it is time-consuming and inconvenient to save the document on your local computer or to browse through the document since the pages are all stored as separate scanned images. For more information on the MFP Collection Manager, see U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/404,916, filed Mar. 31, 2003, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Composing Multimedia Documents,” published Sep. 30, 2004 (publication no. 20040194026).
One convenient feature of MFP collections is the ability to represent hierarchies of collections. One collection can contain one or more subcollections. To add a collection to another collection, in the prior art, a user can place one collection coversheet behind the coversheet of another collection (the container collection), place those collections in the document feeder and press a button on the MFP. Thus, creation of a hierarchy of collections requires at least two separate steps. That is, in order to add a subcollection to a new collection, the subcollection must be created first and then the coversheet of the subcollection added to another collection.
Xerox FlowPort™ and Xerox European Research Centre's Knowledge Pump (KP) are two known document processing systems that allow documents to be entered into a system. Knowledge Pump is based on Xerox's Flowport™ software. In this system, paper forms are constructed that allow users to submit hardcopy documents. Using a combined printer/scanner/copier next to the large screen, the users are able to place a sheet on top of the document and press the start button on the copier. The sheet is recognized as introducing a new document. Thereafter, automatically, the document is scanned, OCR'ed and then the keywords in the OCR'ed document are analyzed to decide to which community it is best suited. Users have the option to override the automatic classification using a web interface. For more information, see Snowden, D. and Grasso, A. (2002) Diffusing Information in Organisational Settings: Learning from Experience. In Proceedings of CHI'02, Minneapolis, Minn. 
The Xerox FlowPort system uses coversheets or document catalogs. Specifically, the Flowport form allows the submission of a single document to a database and allows the user to attach handwritten notes to the document, as well as assign classifications and rank the document in terms of level of interest.
However, in the Knowledge Pump application described above, there is only a single set of documents or database and all documents go into the same database. With Knowledge Pump, there is no indication of the ability to add multiple documents to a collection at once. They use a “cover sheet” rather than a “document separator”. The sheet used in Knowledge Pump indicates that all following pages belong to the document that is being submitted. Furthermore, the Knowledge Pump and Flowport cannot contain hierarchies of documents.
Batch processing and punch cards were one of the earliest methods for inputting data and programs into a computer. However, batch processing and punch cards do not provide collection coversheets or other indices to collections in storage, nor do they show hierarchies of a collection.